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Art + Architecture: Schumacher vs. Post-Net

In some architecture circles, hating on Patrik Shumacher’s “parametricism” is like hating on Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”. It signals a basic shared understanding that, among many other things, artistic professions are not removed from politics, that their practitioners do have responsibilities outside of formal concerns, and that replicating structures of violence is, in general, not a good thing. These conversations are so frequent that they are starting to feel rehearsed: first the staid question, then the momentary pause, finally the sigh of relief. “Now we can move on to the important things.”

I most recently had this experience with a young Austrian student who decided to study at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna – where Shumacher leads studios along with Zaha Hadid and Greg Lynn – known for its supposed avant-gardism. Our conversation circled around Schumacher’s fraught assumption of the term, as well as more generally around a perceived belatedness in architecture in comparison to other fields like design and art. Of course, one of the reasons for this – as Rem Koolhaas has astutely noted – is simply the mechanics of a profession where ideas are realized years after initially drawn out. But there are more vital reasons why Schumacher is considered more a conservative reactionary than an avant-gardist for so many young architects.

Screenshot of Schumacher's Facebook post.

The Viennese student and I discussed Schumacher’s most recent diatribe that he uploaded to his Facebook in March (reproduced above). Schumacher’s rant was directed at the judges of the 2012 Venice Biennale, whom he accuses of being “politically correct” and incapable of distinguishing art and architecture in their decision to award the Golden Lion to an installation documenting the Torre David vertical slum in Caracas and the Best Pavilion award to Toyo Ito’s installation. There are so many things to take issue with that it’s hard to know where to begin. The very need to rant against the implication of politics in deciding an architectural award stamps Schumacher as incredibly out of touch with the contemporary moment. But there is also his attempt to totally distinguish form from content, as if form doesn’t already invoke the content of its materiality in the consumption of real objects. And then there’s his aggrandizement of architecture, which reeks of the absolutist tendencies of the last century that have had such dire implications for the world and that are only now beginning to be dismantled. Even his most innocuous comment – distinguishing art from architecture – continues the regressive modernist practice of separating and isolating disciplines.

It is particularly ironic, then, that the architectural thinking that seems most relevant today to many of young architects (and practitioners and thinkers outside the profession) that I know isn’t coming out of the architectural profession but out of art. This conversation, like so many others, moved seamlessly from architecture to a larger consideration of practices that deal with the changes the internet has had on experiences of space and place.

In general, Schumacher’s ideas feel dated because they ground their radicality in the advent of new technologies in the 90’s, and maintain the techno-futurist aesthetic of that period. But now, in 2014, it feels much more radical to approach these technologies in light of their utter banality and ubiquity. More profound than the opening of new formal potentials is what the internet has done to everyday experience, to the individual’s relation to (physical and virtual) built worlds on discrete levels.

Today, we never actually “log on” or “log off.”

The work of artists variously labeled “net” or “post-internet” often explores and interrogates these territories. The latter term is specifically used to describe the work of a group of artists whose work circulates on digital networks but moves beyond considering the Internet a novelty. It is art after the internet first emerged, art after the existence of the internet as a discrete component of life separate from others. Today, we never actually “log on” or “log off.”

Like other historical attempts to define and brand a new art movement, post-internet discourses have been the target of criticism, particularly in recent months. The use value of the term is debatable and it is used to brand a diverse range of artistic practices that probably shouldn't be branded together. Rather than engaging in the specifics of this debate, or playing the game of labeling artists as participatory in it, I will simply acknowledge the term for its conceptual usefulness and as a basic framework with which to look at the work of a few artists that has compelling implications for architecture.

iSkyTV is a project by the Institute for Infinitely Small Things, a group that “conducts creative, participatory research [aiming] to temporarily transform public spaces and instigate dialogue about democracy, spatial justice and everyday life.” The project reimagines Yoko Ono’s 1966 video work “SkyTV,” which consists of placing a video of a cloudy sky in a gallery, to disrupt the distinction between outside and inside. iSkyTV furthers this gesture by detecting the users’ locations and displaying images of the sky above them using Google Street View. iSkyTV further complicates any distinction between interior and exterior as well as between public and private spheres. It brings an image of “nature” that is housed in a database, has been “digitized, databased, copyrighted and archived,” back into the interior of the home.

An image by Rafman from the 9-Eyes project. Credit: Jon Rafman

One of the artist Jon Rafman’s many projects that deal with architecture and urbanism, 9-Eyes also utilizes Google Street View to explore new relationships with place. Combing through the vastness of the Street View project, Rafman finds images of solitary individuals in diverse landscapes, animals struggling on roads, youths in masks hurtling projectiles, and even what looks like an escaped convict. In selecting and presenting images taken by Google vehicles, he displaces much of the role of the photographer to a machine, leaving only the act of framing and selecting. His work underscores the changing way the user can relate to a larger context, exploring the world – even find moments of the sublime and the uncanny – within the interior of a bedroom.

A screenshot from VastMontage.tv Credit: Felix Melia

London-based artist Felix Melia considers the ways individuals perceive infrastructure and architecture as they pass through it, as well the narratives encoded in that process. One of his on-going projects, Vast Montage, invites users to submit footage of places that are added to an archive and then randomly ordered into an never-ending montage. The work speaks to the way the Internet changes our understanding of our environments and puts us into a continued engagement of editing, choosing, and arranging images. For Melia, this change is not isolated in the virtual, but bleeds into our engagement with 3D places.

Geoff Manaugh, the author of the popular BLDGBLOG, recently compiled a collection of projects by architects and artists that engage in speculative architectures. This, of course, is not a new practice but rather follows in the footsteps of such visionaries as Lebbeus Woods and Archigram. That more and more architects are turning to fictitious projects that will never be, nor are intended to be, realized is not merely a symptom of economic recession (as many have argued). Rather, it showcases a certain ethics of restraint in one’s relation to computer-aided design. Just because something can be built doesn’t mean it should be. Moreover, fiction allows the injection of radical artistic, ecological, and political concerns into architecture, rather than on relying only on a Schumacher-like obsession with creating new forms.

If you’re in search of the next vanguard, you might have more luck on MineCraft then in parametricism.

Many other artists working today are exploring our changing phenomenological experience of space and place – I will highlight others over the course of the next few weeks. A common concern in their work is the exploration of the territory opened up by the shattering of the interior/exterior binary that has plagued architecture since the Greeks. Rather than utilizing new technologies to imagine spectacular(ly expensive) structures, architects can look at the work of artists as a model for understanding how the Internet has changed our relation to space. The Internet is not an additional virtual world but is deeply real and deeply physical. Architects must start to comprehend the implications of this, starting with moving away from understanding their field as contained entirely in the act of building. The avant-garde architectures of the future won’t need dirty money to transform conceptions and experiences of place. In fact, if you’re in search of the next vanguard, you might have more luck on MineCraft then in parametricism.

About the Author

Writer and visual artist living in Los Angeles. I am interested in the margins of architecture, in particular its intersections with art, politics, and ecology. Get in touch: nicholas@archinect.com / nicholaskorody.com

31 Comments

My research the past year has been largely interested in Post Internet or Network Culture Architecture and the combination of the two.

Your article could of been actually called Schumacher vs Schumacher. There is an Artist named Ben Schumacher who has largely contributed to the beginnings of 'Post Internet' Art. He actually did his architecture Undergrad at the University of Waterloo near Toronto and his masters of fine art at NYU. I believe he studied with the 'scrutinized' of the post internet realm IE. Brad Troemel.

If you are interested in this, I would like to talk more as I am working on a small publication about the topic out of the University of Toronto.

That would've been a snazzier title, darn. I forgot about the other Schumacher when writing this, but know and appreciate his work. This will be expanded as a column to feature other artists working architecturally (or the other way around).

I would love to talk more with you -- it seems like our interests are really lined up.

Looking forward to future posts especially from someone your age, not that I am that much older (undergrad in 2002) but that is how fast internet culture or whatever you want to call has changed I guess. Wondering if you are familiar with the thinking that was coming out of ctheory.net in the late 90's, paul virillo, and mitchell (was mit dean architecture I think when he wrote bit city and me+), if you are I would be interested to know whats fundamentally changed or how are we post internet? I think I could argue minekraft is a form of parametricism plus a social input which as i read it from schumachers rant above should be excluded essentially or at least politically (but how do you separate social from political?!?)...when I was kid we had MUDDs and chat rooms and you logged on and off - before Netscape -- I still log on and off and even completely disconnect....in the sense of Deleuze virtual I get your point about deeply real and deeply physical internet (like say religion and unicorns) but I feel that takes a few steps that at least someone like me or say Schumacher perhaps familiar with internet culture and technology of the 90's find clear enough to not make it immediately real and physical. This is why the 10 year difference is interesting to me. I once wanted to make a website called disinformation but everyone told me the government already did that....and now the world on purposes or accident does this and the truth becomes googled or binged. Wikipedia is bad for research right?...anyway apologize for ramble - you said phenomenonology - I am listening.

this article is like a blind person criticizing another blind person's conception of the visual world around him. it is very true that schumacher marries the distasteful and ostentatious dognatism of conservatism with the amoral whorishness of liberalism but criticism of this does not and should not lead to -by way of derivation or associative opposition- uncritically embracing the works of art simply for the seeming distance away from schumacher. there is no reason or logic in doing this.

in fact, there is a whole lot to be said about how a lot of art, installation art in particular, is solipsistic, individualistic (as in catering to individualistic experiences or experiences of individualism), dissociated from politics (thus rendering itself acquiescent, participatory in a culture of aesthetic consumption, uncritical of the actual power structures in place...even as it pretends to be avant-garde, cutting edge and so on), an aesthetic proxy of hyper-capitalist, and yes, indeed, l'art pour l'art. much of this has proven to be then cynically used -by the power structures that remain untouched, uncriticized, unidentified- as human behavioral experiments, for further surveillance and mass control. in short art in the service of control and even war.

here is a droll case where one critic criticizes another critic and where they may well both be right about the other and wrong about themselves.

its droll that schumacher doesn't perceive how political his architecture is/has become (and indeed how this political valour has been spurred on -ironically or insidiously- by his pretension of the preclusion of politics within architecture). or otherwise he knows this well enough and uses this apolitical pretension to occupy an increasingly political role within the theocracy of the contemporary architectural culture. whether one agrees with his politics or not (i don't), its become far easier to disagree with his apolitics.

this is great stuff. however- my one criticism is that this is still very much focused on individual perception - the interesting thing about the internet is that it has helped facilitate or augment social/collective interactions and experiences that take place in the physical environment. there's a lot of sharing going on... and it's shifting our shared cultural experiences to being at both the same time global and hyper-local.

i certainly didn't mean to convey a total lack of criticality towards these or other artists associated with postinternet art but i can see how you read it this way. quite to the contrary, i agree that art rests too confidently on assumed defenses for its being. this is particularly true of postinternet art and its tenuous relation to the speculative market. there is, indeed, a whole lot to be said about all of this and i mean to later on. this article was meant to serve as an introduction, broadly looking at how the work of various people outside the profession utilizes the internet to disrupt some of the normative frameworks of architecture. over the next few weeks, i hope to engage more critically with the work of young artists and architects individually, rather than generalizing in the way that I think you may have read this. obviously this is not a robust critique of parametricism or schumachers politic. he just talks the loudest and everyone is pretty familiar with what it is he's saying.

Very interesting article and looking forward to reading more. The internet as a social space has always been easy for me to understand (I'm an old-timer here in the studio culture of Archinect, after all, and it's never felt less "real" than any studio of school or a workplace I've experienced). The way the internet disrupts the separation of inside/outside is still not something I've thought about beyond looking for houses on Street View.

Note: on the iphone app the name if the author doesn't seem to appear on the article page itself? I had to come into the comment space to find it.

There are two internets, one that is useful and 'architectural'--yelp, google maps, foursquare, NYTimes (for New Yorkers) and a ultra narcissistic one disconnected to place where the individual is supreme...call it the social libertarian internet. I find the friendship model to be outdated and not reflective of the physical space.

With Schumacher, of course he is right and wrong. He is coming from the side that politics and intentions do not equal the reality of built work. But of course intentions do direct the quality. I prefer a Billie Tsien quote, it is about "the hands that build it and the hands that use it. You have to look at both sides not one or another.

After living there for 48 years and moving out late October 2006, I never thought I'd see the inside of my old house again. Just two days ago I was surprised and quickly saddened by some interior images of my old house online, taken apparently like a year ago:

You can consider this post a work of post-internet art entitled Learning from Virtual Museum to Oblivion.

"i certainly didn't mean to convey a total lack of criticality towards these or other artists associated with postinternet art but i can see how you read it this way. "

You conveyed a total lack of criticality simply vis a vis a total lack of criticality, you don't need to mean to convey it.

" i agree that art rests too confidently on assumed defenses for its being."

that wasn't really my point and I don't see where we agree. should you feel the desire, kindly reread my post. there was no discussion of defense.

"this article was meant to serve as an introduction, broadly looking at how the work of various people outside the profession utilizes the internet to disrupt some of the normative frameworks of architecture. over the next few weeks,"

three points here. bringing in Schumacher was not really very pertinent (neither by affiliation nor by contrast) and was misleading therefore (not misleading for us i mean, misleading for you).

furthermore, there is within you, as expressed, already a proclivity to uncritically accept what comes your way in whatever form of seeming disruptions of "normative frameworks of architecture". even the term "normative framework" is a compound cliche. you've already accepted and embraced this culture by accepting it on its own terms and pursuing examples of it, uncritically, and you really aim to be its journalist...not its critic. there is a vast difference.

lastly, one starts to ask what you mean by art...given that any media manipulation, deliberate phenomenological aberration or manipulation can pass off as art under that guise of disruption. shall you therefore remove that term art? ..because, after all, on those grounds, companies like Google and Apple and the people they bring in -who can't be called artists- are powerhouses when it comes to ventures of this sort. and therefore, by definition, their art is conformist, utilitarian, acquiescent and follows certain agendas, that of capitalism, compliance with the politics of the hegemony. Google, for instance, is known for being a participant in US military and intelligence within the US and abroad....so whatever little experiment-for-experiment's sake it subsidizes might well find its way into this arena of power, politics and war.

Mind you, I'm not discounting or attacking the very substance of one installation or the other per se...

its rather a question of blind spots...and of a certain acceptance of a culture of thinking...and not thinking.

Dear Tammuz the Sumerian God of Food and Vegetation and somewhat anti-christian-western symbol if you so choose to spin it that way, which can be done with little effort.....

My guess is you won't address me or anyone with questions you can't flat out negate from semantic manipulations of text only - as you so feverishly do in archispeak ramblings of mind boggling philosophical regurgitations....I'm doing it now - see see - I speaky like you.

You could at least answer Fred's question - What is your favorite book?

t a m m u z tammuz

If blind people are criticizing blind people then we are in somewhat of a crisis and the thinking then begins, but appears in your absolute negation of all positive points and aptitude for deconstructive linguistic behavior - the only thing you know or can assume to know is what is readily accepted as known - like matter - is WRONG.

Another way to put it, the critique of the situation will be somewhat murky and unknown as the situation clearly is murky and unknown - post internet already makes me doubt the conception of the situation - so we throw the bass sounds at the walls.

As much as I could go Guy Debord on this shit as you do in your negative aspirations, the reality is the spectacle is more real than the situationist critique, which was nothing more than a delusional denial of the soon to come visceral life blood of the virtual - as Mr. Korody suggests. Buzz words - if that's how you are defining the use of Schumacher here - are contextual - very much in this debate, it's beyond me why you of all fancy writers can't read that far into it?

Ok back to the blog....it appears the schumacher link and the post internet link are linked to articles on web text from the same month - march - ides of march.....here are qoutes from the links I like.......sorry on smart phone no enter or new paraphing abilities in the archinect............... post-internet art instead references one so deeply embedded in and propelled by the internet that the notion of a world or culture without or outside it becomes increasingly unimaginable, impossible..................... What we mean when we say ‘Internet’ became not a thing in the world to escape into, but rather the world one sought escape from… sigh… It became the place where business was conducted, and bills were paid. It became the place where people tracked you down................ But for the Berlin-based artist Hito Steyerl, who posed that question in a recent essay for the arts website e-flux, the very ubiquity of the internet means that it no longer has any coherence. It might, in fact, no longer exist at all. “The internet persists offline as a mode of life, surveillance, production and organization,” Steyerl argues. It infects everything from personal identities and romantic relationships to political debates and public advocacy. “It is undead and it’s everywhere,” the artist writes: the internet, having seeped into every pore of society, seems increasingly hard to pin down. So hard to pin down, in fact, that it might be nowhere at all.

Thanks to the enormous scans within some really incredible online archives, I'm, just for about a month now, becoming very familiar with the volumes of post-Piranesi Italian archaeologists. For example,The great multitude of drawings filled with all their fine detail just seem to fulfill some innate longing of mine. And I'm finding myself not at all bothered if some of the 'reconstructions' are not actually correct because I'm enjoying all the data as a unique and kind of atemporal/fictitious virtual environment.

And a book that I'm presently dissecting (literally) to discovery the full workings of it's 'anatomy' is Hejduk's Pewter Wings, Golden Horns, Stone Veils: 60016002 so far.

And one of my favorite things to do, for almost 18 years now, is compose and publish 'books' via html and the internet.

Oh, and without question, t a m m u z is my favorite poster within archinect/forum. No one else produces a distinctive work of art almost every time. (And t a m m u z, just so there's no confusion, I objectively mean that.)

it sounds nice, what you're saying Quondam so thank you...or am i turning the table on myself (going by what i said about some 'art')?

going back some posts ago, while its become sickeningly cliched to accuse someone of obfuscation by way of forced complexity and criticality, i'm wondering whether we should recognize when someone obfuscates by way of forced 'simplism' and unjustified conformity.

t2z, I wouldn't worry about turning the tables on yourself because you have a very real talent of just turning the tables period, as your latest supposition above clearly exemplifies.

I get 'simplism' and conformity, but I'm not totally sure what forced 'simplism' and unjustified conformity mean. Is it like the force and the unjustification underlie and scaffold/support the mask of obfuscation itself? (Or something like that?)

Again, Re: favorite book, just before your post arrived, I was remembering a post of mine from over a year ago:2013.04.05 12:42For a few of weeks now, I've been of the opinion that [Schumacher's] The Autopoiesis of Architecture would have been a much better book if it had been written and composed like S,M,L,XL.

which was spurred on by:2008.04.05 14:05It may be well worth noting that the publication of S,M,L,XL closely coincides with the dawn of the easily-browsable/easily-publishable hypersized internet. Ends and beginnings are both extreme situations.

2008.04.05 16:49S,M,L,XL is indeed a kind of "browsable" book that predates the internet in its breadth, and, for me at least, has stimulated publishing via the internet.As far as I'm concerned, the internet makes "creating a fixed/fluid, massive, all-encapsulating text" even more possible.

About the books...I think Schumacher's book is not so browsable, in that it is polemical.

If anything, schumacher is polemical, always arguing, always on the defensive, always thinking of winning the argument against a possible future counter-argument or against a preceding counter- argument. So he uses different parts to resolve each at his end, different approaches (my favourite is his semiotics section...) because, while schumacher's thinking is really interesting, yet by trying to cover its flanks it displays so many vulnerability for attack and criticism. There is a clear consistent voice, too consistent, that shows up in different approaches in order to reach a unified end.

I'm not a koolhaas expert but, from what i've come across, I would say that Koolhaas is far more aphoristic, in his writing and thinking, he derives great energy from conflicting, opposing tropes (i dont just mean architecturally, i mean rhetorically), the drama of revealing and admitting hypocricies if you wish. it leaves self-sufficient dramatic marks that dont resort to undercurrent narratives of self defense. and if i recall the impression, they display their contradictory flanks that surprise in their frankness.

schumacher is interesting but frustrating in his stubbornness, self-trapping, extremely susceptible to attack, fallible. he is the intelligent endlessly discursive and self-defensive plump boy who makes you want to pinch him

Quondam, I would suggest Bruce Mau had more to do with S, M, L, XL's content representation matching the future of the internet than Koolhaas. As I remember it, around the time the book was published the internet was closer in appearance to the magazine shelf in the library than a wiki page blog format fading into the ether[net] of information and infecting everything in reality as Hito Steyerl suggests (see links from blog)

"...I'm wondering whether we should recognize when someone obfuscates by way of forced 'simplism' and unjustified conformity."

the hip and the cool are a lightweight form of counter-culture, which naturally found it's home in the medium of the internet. A lightweight counter-culture is easy to manage with regard to population control, especially if the lightweight counter-culture can substitute the urge to revolt by means of people posting angry rants on facebook instead of acting out in rampages in city squares. A culture in which you can tell the man (your boss) to shove it, graffiti the world wide web with consipiracy theories on everything from twinkies to unknown wars and still keep your day job. Freedom of speech without any meaning and ultimately consequences - allowing infromation collection by Facebook to show and tell you what you like (actually a topic on CNN last weekend), and you unwittingly don't mind.

Tammuz, your statement is more a critique of the very medium on which much of obfuscation by way of forced simplism and unjustified conformity flourishes - the internet(world wide web to be specific - http-ish, not so much FTP protocols or bit torrents, etc...). In other words the medium's natural state is simplism and unjustified conformity. So simple that with minimum attention you can read it - a blog, a tweet by a twit or a post. Unjustified conformity because there is no exchange. There is no manner in which to justify value of content, unless of course forces outside the internet intervene or connect with the information on the web directly - or the representation of information on the internet is accurate to physical reality in local space and time.

Koolhaas in essence declares God/culture is dead, but then goes on to design monuments to this statement, unintentionally of course through neutral diagrams of information incubating within a cultural brew; which then only brings forth the culture's actual state of mind - all the while Koolhaas markets this method and approach as fun, hip and cool.

There is no better mask to nihilism than fun and no better way to increase the national GDP than to make all the meaningless routines of production appear and feel real...

Olaf, I'm well aware of Mau's role in S,M,L,XL, and note that I never mention Mau nor Koolhaas, just S,M,L,XL. Furthermore, I was not making any point about the internet and S,M,L,XL matching in terms of content representation (i.e., their appearance), rather that S,M,L,XL pretty much succeeds at being a "fixed/fluid, massive, all-encapsulating text" and that the internet made/makes a "fixed/fluid, massive, all-encapsulating text" even more possible.

1.

2.

3.

Presently, I design Quondam more along the lines of #1. Although I'd rather be designing along the lines of number #2. If I actually started to work at designing the way I'd like too, then perhaps I'll arrive at #3.

Mitchell's City of Bits and Quondam-a virtual museum of architecture do indeed share a coincidence: City of Bits published 1996.08.01 and Quondam's first online visitor 1996.11.21 (although Quondam's initial content was online 1996.11.20). I heard Mitchell speak at a seminar sometime 1997 and first read City of Bits after that. I spoke with Mitchell briefly about the speed of signals, the speed of light, and how a signal sent from Earth to Mars at the speed of light would take 10 minutes to get there.

Regarding Ichnographia [Quondam?], recombinant architecture, etc.:1996.06.21another museum of architecture reference Another reference to the "virtual museum of architecture" came from reading some in Rossi's The Architecture of the City. I am reading the chapters (headings) in reverse order and in the introduction to the 2nd Italian edition, Rossi makes reference to the Canaletto painting Capriccio.From Rossi, p. 116: "After I wrote this book and from the concepts I postulated in it, I outlined the hypothesis of the analogous city, in which I attempted to deal with theoretical questions concerning design in architecture. In particular I elaborated a compositional procedure that is based on certain fundamental artifacts in the urban reality around which other artifacts are constituted within the framework of an analogous system. To illustrate this concept I gave the example of Canaletto's fantasy view of Venice, a capriccio in which Palladio's project for the Ponti di Rialto, the Basilica of Vicenza, and the Palazzo Chiericate are set next to each other and described as if the painter were rendering an urban scene he had actually observed. These three Palladian monuments, none of which are actually in Venice (one is a project; the other two are in Vicenza), nevertheless constitute an analogous Venice formed of specific elements associated with the history of both architecture and the city. The geographic transposition of the monuments within the painting constitutes a city that we recognize, even though it is a place of purely architectural reference. This example enables me to demonstrate how a logical-formal operation could be translated into a design method and then into a hypothesis for a theory of architectural design in which the elements were pre-established and formally defined, but where the significance that sprung forth at the end of the operation was the authentic, unforeseen, and original meaning of the work."Immediately I think of the Strasbourg, Düsseldorf, Hurva composite building (1993)that I have created in 3d model form, and I would like to sometime in the future elaborate on how the composite is perhaps an analogous building. Furthermore, Rossi's point provides great fuel for future manipulation of my models and Canaletto's painting in particular provides inspiration and a grounding in terms of a "plan" for the "virtual museum" itself. [see also atemporality at work]Overall, I see the analogous city concept working in tandem with the "virtual museum of architecture" idea, and I am at this point also interested in adding the collage city idea/methodology to the "museum" idea.

As you can see, the core of my thinking about what composes Quondam happened a couple of months before City of Bits was even published, and the idea of a museum of architecture composed of CAD models goes back at least to early 1991, spurred on by the "Architecture in the Museum" and "The Decline and Fall of Architecture" chapters within Vidler's The Writing of the Walls (1987, purchased 1988).

And if by Ichnographia you mean Piranesi's Ichnographia Campus Martius, I began to redraw that plan via CAD May 1987, within a week or two of purchasing my own CAD system. (I had been using Intergraph CAD since 1983, first at Cooper & Pratt Architects, and then at the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania--it seemed to greatly distress Dean Copeland to have to hire a member of staff that did not have a graduate degree; yes, they paid me to be there rather than the other way around.) I purchased ArrisCad because that was the only CAD software at the time that offered fully integrated 2D and 3D operable on a PC (with a 40MB hard drive and 4MG RAM, can you imaging?!?).